Many frameworks, including Laravel, also provide an architectural paradigm — that is, a way of organizing and designing an application's source code. Laravel uses the "Model View Controller" (MVC) paradigm, which is popular among web frameworks. In the MVC architecture, an app's code is organized into three main components:

Model, which defines the data structure and communicates with a database;

View, which handles the interface between the application and users;

Controller, which manages data flow and communication between the Model and the View.

All these features make building an app in Laravel much faster than building from scratch. This makes Laravel a popular tool for rapid PHP development.

Laravel Tutorials

Laravel Tutorial from Tutorials Point provides a very clear introduction to the framework and is a good place to get a high-level overview of the major features.

Laravel: My First Framework is a narrative introduction to Laravel, explained by a PHP developer as he becomes familiar with the framework. It isn't a conventional tutorial, but it does provide an interesting perspective for people new to Laravel or PHP frameworks in general.

Additional Learning Resources

A large number of sites have excellent collections of Laravel tutorials covering a wide variety of specific topics.

Code Happy (2012), by Dayle Rees, is probably the best dead-tree book for beginners starting to learn the Laravel framework. It was written by one of the core developers, and presents the information in a straightforward and well-organized manner.

Laravel Reference Guide (2016), by Sheikh Heera, is a great general resource for beginners and intermediate Laravel users, covering everything from installation and setup to advanced topics.

Laravel Application Development Blueprints (2013), by Kiliçdagi and Yilmaz, is aimed at intermediate to advanced Laravel developers. It introduces a number of app projects and sketches out the most important aspects of building each. It does not provide complete code examples for each project, but rather lays out a general plan (or "blueprint"), giving the reader a good idea of how to approach each project.

Learning Laravel's Eloquent (2015), by Francesco Malatesta, covers Eloquent, Laravel's object relational mapper (ORM). If you work with a relational database like MySQL, and you are confused about how ActiveRecord works, this is the book for you.

Laravel 5.x Cookbook (2016), by Alfred Nutile, serves as a great desk-reference for Laravel programmers. It provides a wide variety of design patterns and typical solutions to cproblems commonly encountered by developers using the framework.

Should I learn Laravel?

Laravel is one of the more popular PHP development frameworks. If you've been learning PHP, building small applications, or working with WordPress, you really should get a handle on working with one or more development frameworks. Laravel is a great place to start.

Further Reading and Resources

We have more guides, tutorials, and infographics related to web development:

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Confused about what programming language you should learn to code in? Check out our infographic, What Code Should You Learn? It not only discusses different aspects of the languages, it answers important questions such as, "How much money will I make programming PHP for a living?"